Dammit, Janet: two 'Rocky Horrors'?

Just what Halloween needs: a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania.

Or two.

"The Rocky Horror Show" gets two stagings during this frightful season, at Andrews Living Arts Studio in Broward County and Entr'Acte Theatrix in Palm Beach County.

"Of course, at Halloween, people are looking for the macabre," says Robert D. Nation, director of the Fort Lauderdale version. "They want the unusual, and surely [Rocky Horror] is not the usual fare."

Timing is everything.

"I doubt if we would have done [the show] in June," admits Vicki Halmos, founder of Entr'Acte Theatrix in Palm Beach. "Something about that just doesn't ring right. It was something we always wanted to do. The [Crest Theatre in Delray Beach] was available and the fabulous Kevin Black was available to direct."

"The most-surprising thing about the script is that it was very short and [offered] not much direction," Black says. "It's kind of like Shakespeare in that you could mold it into whatever version you wanted. That opened a lot of doors creatively. So I made a conscious decision to not watch the movie again and to just see what came to me."

What came to him was to make the Transylvanian chorus into phantoms and to render Dr. Frank-N-Furter's crew "more along the lines of punk meets goth meets futuristic."

Nation says that the Andrews Living Arts Studio's "Rocky Horror" — staged in downtown Fort Lauderdale's F.A.T. Village — will be closer to the big-screen version.

"Our intent is to honor the work of Tim Curry and the original cast of both the show and the movie, since Universal has pulled the rights with the intention of doing a remake," Nation says. "On Halloween night, we're doing it outdoors, surrounded by graffiti from the art gallery next door."